A Separation
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 30, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
95
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
41
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallFeb 29, 2012
It's a mystery wrapped inside an enigmatic nation, flawlessly acted and difficult to predict. I'm always impressed when a movie informs about a foreign culture while it entertains, and this one is powerful art in that regard. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenFeb 9, 2012
The story winds its way over the material, forcing the characters and the viewers to constantly reassess everything they have seen and heard. Read full review
100
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezFeb 2, 2012
The movie has such a profound and compassionate understanding of human behavior, family ties and the way ordinary people respond when they're forced into a moral quandary, I can't imagine anyone not being transfixed by it. Read full review
100
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzFeb 2, 2012
A great movie, a look inside a world so foreign that it might as well be another planet, yet so universal that its observations are painfully familiar to anyone, anywhere. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeWesley MorrisJan 26, 2012
This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied. Read full review
100
Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesJan 26, 2012
The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 26, 2012
The film is a singular achievement, a piece of realist cinema with the pull of a suspense thriller. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertJan 25, 2012
The actors, as sometimes happens, create those miracles that can endow a film with conviction. Moadi and Hatami, as husband and wife, succeed in convincing us their characters are acting from genuine motives. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleAmy BiancolliJan 19, 2012
Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanJan 4, 2012
Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition. Read full review
100
SlateDana StevensJan 4, 2012
Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be. Read full review
100
TimeRichard CorlissJan 3, 2012
However ripe A Separation might seem for being adapted into a smart American film, Hollywood shouldn't bother. Farhadi's movie is just about perfect as it is. Read full review
100
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 30, 2011
Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end. Read full review
100
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 30, 2011
A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes. Read full review
100
NPRBob MondelloDec 30, 2011
A film that captures the drama and suspense of real life as urgently as any picture released this year. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 29, 2011
A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 29, 2011
The members of the cast represent ensemble, naturalistic acting at its finest. Read full review
100
USA TodayClaudia PuigDec 29, 2011
Sophisticated and universal yet deeply intimate, A Separation is an exquisitely conceived family drama that has the coiled power of a top-notch thriller. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubScott TobiasDec 29, 2011
Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand. Read full review
100
IndieWireEric KohnDec 26, 2011
It's a frantic microcosm of life itself. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfDec 20, 2011
The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianShawn LevyFeb 2, 2012
It happens to be splendidly acted and to be poised, as a narrative, on a knife's edge (the final shot, at a great moment of indecision, is utterly haunting). But, chiefly, it's a portrait of an essential and sympathetic human dilemma, and in that it's both real and timeless in ways that transcend borders, cultures and languages. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJan 7, 2012
What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungJan 4, 2012
As in all the director's work, the cast is given top consideration and their realistic acting results in unusual depth of characterization. Read full review
90
VarietyAlissa SimonJan 4, 2012
Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging. Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJan 3, 2012
The writer and director, Asghar Farhadi, has thus created the perfect antithesis of a crunching disaster flick, such as "2012," which was all boom and no ripple. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanMar 3, 2012
Every time it starts to feel like something we have known, we realize how unlike us these Iranian characters are. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsFeb 17, 2012
Although it's slow to unfold, this courtroom drama is so timelessly humane and even-handed it feels like it came from the dockets of Solomon - by way of Sidney Lumet. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJan 26, 2012
It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 25, 2012
It is a mystery and a courtroom drama. Above all, however, it is a tale of love and sacrifice. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick GroenJan 19, 2012
Much like Robert Altman during his forays into the genre, writer/director Asghar Farhadi isn't really interested in the answers. Instead, he keeps expanding the questions, until that singular title comes to seem a misnomer. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 29, 2011
A Separation is a landmark film. No way will you be able to get it out of your head. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineNick SchagerDec 27, 2011
Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional. Read full review
85
MovielineStephanie ZacharekDec 29, 2011
A Separation doesn't try to make easy sense of that world, or of this family's suffering. It's simply a quiet cry of anguish. Read full review
80
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottMar 2, 2012
It's the little moments in Farhadi's film that are its most important, speaking every bit as loudly as its big, narrative-driving moments. Read full review
80
Boxoffice MagazineWade MajorJan 31, 2012
Meticulously thoughtful and economical in its execution, from its camerawork to its editing, Farhadi's carefully wrought narrative and the ways it handles the fragile emotions of its characters truly sets it apart, not only from contemporary Iranian cinema but world cinema in general. Read full review
80
EmpireDavid ParkinsonJan 4, 2012
Powerful art cinema that challenges political and social unity in Iran. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. ScottDec 29, 2011
It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierDec 28, 2011
Together and apart, Hatami and Maadi are magnetic. Hatami, a star in Iranian cinema, lets us see Simin's intelligence and defiant sense of self-worth often with nothing more than a gesture. Read full review
80
Village VoiceJ. HobermanDec 27, 2011
What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men. Read full review
75
New York PostKyle SmithDec 30, 2011
In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties. Read full review
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